Category Archives: Friendship

It astonishes me that the weirdest and creepiest moment I experienced while living on prison grounds had nothing to do with living on prison grounds. It was year two into my ten year exile in the land of desolation (as my pre-adolescent mind perceived it), and I was starting a new school for the second time in two years. Despite my protestations, it was determined that, rather than the local junior high, parochial school would be a better fit for me. So when September of my second year rolled around, I donned my ever so modest and very uncomfortable Catholic school uniform, made the long walk down the hill to the main road where I boarded a bus. During my long morning journey, I rode past prisons and tobacco fields until I reached the “industrial ” side of town where I was deposited at the entrance of a very small school. This was a school that children had attended since kindergarten. It was a polish school, and, as I would soon learn, polish was often spoken, not during instruction but at other times, between teachers, teachers and students, the students themselves. This would have been fine…except for the fact that I am not Polish. Needless to say, the experience was, for lack of a better word, disorienting. My memories of my years at this school come with a soundtrack. Always, not matter what the visual image is, I hear Jim Morrison hauntingly singing “People are strange, when you’re a stranger. Faces look ugly…”

Anyway, I was not the only unfortunate to be starting seventh grade at my new school. A couple of kids from the local Montessori , which only ran until sixth grade, were enrolled. Now, those poor souls were completely out of their element. They were and remained separate from everyone else. They were a docile and different species of child that had no hope of assimilation. And then there was the other group of newcomers.

Apparently there had been a group of Catholics from a neighboring town that had been reprimanded by their diocese because of, without getting into sordid details, cult-like activity. Well, the pastor of my new school’s parish, in an act of mercy or forgiveness or whatever, decided to allow former members of the parish in question to enroll their children in his school. Soooooooo….

Let’s just say that it sucks to be the new kid in school, especially when you are eleven years old. And, new kids gravitate to other new kids. So when the new kids from the neighboring town offered me their friendship, I gratefully accepted. Of course, there was always something different about my new friends, although I could never quite put my finger on what it was. They were just so unlike the kids I hung with from back home. My friends and I used to be from similar backgrounds. We went to school and girl scouts together. We were silly and had fun. We used to laugh..a lot…about ridiculous things. We played hide and seek and tag. We played with Care Bears and Smurfs and Cabbage Patch Kids, and I think, for the most part, we were all relatively happy. But these new girls were different. They were dour. But, they offered friendship, something I so needed, so craved, that I would have accepted it from anyone.

After about a month, my new friends began inviting me to their homes for sleepovers. I remember well the long and lonely drive to their houses. We passed prisons and corn fields and tobacco fields and old colonial houses until we finally reached our destination. And their homes were so unlike anything to which I was accustomed. They were large, large enough to accommodate families with eight and nine children. And they were old and, well, from my standpoint as a child and still to this day, creepy. As a matter of fact, one of my friends had informed me that her living room was haunted. And you know what? As an adult looking back almost thirty years later, I believe it. There was a feeling, a flat, sad, heavy, lifeless feeling to her home. Just as my new friend, the house was somber and cheerless. It was as if it existed in a dream and its reality was from a time past. It was eerie. I remember not being able to sleep when I stayed there. Insomnia, true insomnia, which began in my new home on prison grounds, settled in during my stays in that house.

I remember another chilly autumn day, when I packed up my overnight bag and headed over to another one of my new friend’s homes. Again, it was large, large enough to acccomodate my friends’s eight other siblings and her parents. It was the day after Halloween. What’s funny is that I don’t remember what I had done the night prior. Did I go trick-or-treating? Who knows? I can recall every Halloween I ever celebrated, except for that one. Perhaps it’s because the events of the day after overshadowed the festivities of the night before. I remember being hungry and feeling happy when I heard that my friend’s mother was ordering pizza. I remember sitting at the table and hearing her mother say, in a rather serious tone, “Okay. Let’s get the saints.” My friend and a handful of her siblings got up. I followed them from the kitchen into the dining room, where, on the sideboard, was a vast collection of statues of the saints. Now I have to state here that I have never been fond of statues and always found them a bit creepy. So you can imagine my chagrin when I had to carry two eight inch statues and place them on the kitchen table so that they could join us for dinner. Unfortunately, right in front of me, my friend had placed the statue of Saint Michael slaying the devil. Now there is nothing that creeps the shit out of me more than Lucifer. As a child, when other kids were afraid of monsters or robbers, I was afraid of the devil; the one with the tail and horns and pitchfork; the one on the old Red Devil Paint cans. And there he was. In front of me. Being slain. Saint Michael slaying the God damned devil, with his scales and horns and tail right in front of me. During dinner. Of course I wondered what the hell (pardon the pun) was going on. And, of course, my question was answered when my friend’s mother began the prayer and instructed us to bow our heads and thank God that we were all gathered together, celebrating All Saints’ Day with the saints. It was just too much.

If only I had the wherewithal to call my parents and ask them to get me the hell (ooops there it is again) out of there. Instead I stayed. Insomnia kicked in, but I made it to morning. And I think, although I don’t remember, that when my mother arrived to pick me up, I probably enjoyed my ride home, past the old colonial homes, and barren trees, past corn fields and tobacco fields until I was nice and safe, back at home…on prison grounds.

I was a Facebook holdout, a lone wolf. I refused to sign on to something I simply didn’t support, something I found silly, useless, juvenile. I fought my feelings of alienation when, during playdates with our children at the park, my actual friends would meet their Facebook friends in the flesh and laugh and talk about all the great stuff they learned about their mutual Facebook friends on Facebook…huh? I was in complete denial that I felt like I was missing out, like I was the kid in high school who didn’t get invited to the party. I held on strong to my convictions and didn’t join Facebook for years. Then this past March I gave it up, signed on and became addicted. Addicted to the constant stream of virtual human contact, to the anticipation of being friended, to the excitement of “connecting” with people from my past, but mostly to the 24/7 “contact” with the world of the living because, as a stay-at-home mother of highly spirited children and the wife of a man who works long and late hours, sometimes I need a little distraction and contact with the world outside of my home.

Once I joined Facebook, I became a part of an alternate reality where some people have 500 plus friends. 500 plus friends!!! I can’t even wrap my head around that! I mean tops I’ve got three good, solid, true blue friends. I also don’t really have many acquaintances because I don’t particularly see the point. It’s not that I’m anti-social; it’s just, why would I be in a relationship that isn’t going to move forward? It’s like remaining with a boyfriend for fifteen years but never getting any real commitment on his part. I want my acquaintanceships to move forward and develop into true friendships, but, as I have come to realize, some people just aren’t interested in everything that real friendship entails. Perhaps many of my acquaintances choose not to become friends with me because of the fact that I am a weird chic and not for everyone, but I think the bigger issue is our reluctance as a people and society to foster meaningful relationships. This reluctance seems to illustrate some deeper sociological issues and gives us insight into how, why and what friendship has become. Why are we so willing and needy to accumulate “friends” on Facebook but not friends in the flesh? What does this say about us as adults and how are we to teach our children the value of true, genuine friendship?

Yet, when I think about the “friends” I have made since I became a mother, I understand how we devolved from classifying friends into best friends, friends and acquaintance categories to making the distinction between real friends and mommy friends to having real friends and Facebook friends without really making or perhaps even knowing or caring about the distinction. As a stay-at-home mom I have to say that I was SCHOOLED in what friendship has become. When my Jack was a baby, I met a group of women at the library’s Mother Goose Time and we started a playgroup. All of our children were very close in age and we began meeting regularly and friendships were quickly formed. For me, the birth of my first-born was so profoundly life altering and special that anyone I spent time with became very significant. I naively thought that the bonds I formed with other mothers during that time were quite possibly forever. Then I learned that I was a “mommy’ friend, as opposed to a real friend. References in emails and conversations made it very clear that, with the exception of myself and a few other mothers, members of our group had compartmentalized the other women in the group into a separate and distinct category. This unique “mommy” friend category made us the recipients of late night panicked calls about sick children and invitations to child friendly Halloween parties, but our part in each others’ lives ended there. Real friends were included in the rest.

So if we put up with “mommy” friendships, it makes sense that we would accept Facebook friendships–cold, impersonal relations where we bitch and talk at and inform each other about ourselves without the space nor the expectation of the reader that we will explain ourselves, explore topics or discuss anything in-depth. So why do we do it, and how is it possible that we would ever become addicted to it??? Are we so very disconnected, so very lonely? Are our expectations so very low that we will put up with and crave Facebook friendships and connections and updates? I guess the answer is yes. Yes, we want to connect with the outside world. We want to feel popular and liked. We want the “company” of others no matter how it comes to us.

Using Facebook for companionship reminds me of when I was a child and my mother would bring my brother and I to visit my great-grandmother and my great-uncle at their studio apartments in the elderly housing complex. Inevitably, regardless of the time of day, the television would be on. As children, my brother and I spent our afternoons in the sunshine playing outside. It just seemed so incredibly wrong and unnatural to us that, on afternoons where the sun shined so brightly you could see the dust of seemingly clean apartments dance in the light of sunbeams, a person would remain inside with the television playing watching As the World Turns or syndicated episodes of God knows what awful cop-buddy series was popular ten years earlier. I remember one day asking my mother why old people watched television in the afternoon and her answer was, “because they are lonely.”

Maybe that’s it. Maybe we are all lonely and needy and in want of connections to others and our past and life. So, we Facebook. Let’s just hope that when we are ninety and our great-grandchildren visit us in assisted living that they don’t find us, rather than watching syndicated episodes of whatever is popular on television today, Facebooking virtual friends; friends who never really cared much about us to have a real friendships; friends who seldom if ever visited us in person or sacrificed or shared or compromised like real friends do. Let’s hope that in addition to our great-grandchildren, we have real friends who visit us. And, above all else, let’s hope that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have real friends who love them with a true, real, actual love that transcends the virtual world.